I'd like to first thank Scott Raymond for linking to this article, and secondly I'd like to thank Matthew Sturges for writing a bold, yet important message about evangelism. Here's an excerpt, but everyone, and I mean everyone, should head on over there and take a read.

You, though. You don't believe in magic, or personalized deities. You believe that if there is a God, it's not some dude with a beard in a big white castle, but rather some kind of energy that permeates the universe or something. Or maybe you're a pagan, or a Wiccan, or whatever, and you've come to believe that Christianity as a blanket entity is simply so much horseshit. That's strike one.

Strike two is that you're far more sophisticated than that fifth century peasant. I don't necessarily mean that as a compliment. You're more worldly, certainly more knowledgeable about how the world works, but at the same time, you're also more closed off, less likely to accept new ideas and far more likely to scoff at them.

Strike three is that you live in a culture where everywhere you turn, someone is trying to sell you something. Those someones are all over the place, and they all want your money. They don't give a flying fig for you as a person, and you're certain that any one of them would step over their own grandmothers for a nickel. They use crude selling techniques that appeal to your emotions and your physical desires. They try to mislead you by applying unreasonable hyperbole to the thing they're trying to sell.

Three strikes. The church heads back to the dugout again.